Paleoethnobotany (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Watson. Joshua Schnell. Shanti Morell-Hart. Andrew Scherer.

This is an abstract from the "Medicine and Healing in the Americas: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Botanical residues recovered from the proposed marketplace area of Piedras Negras have revealed rich information about healing and medicinal activities of Classic Period inhabitants. Excavations in this sector yielded a high quantity of identifiable plant remains in the same contexts as human dental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Holloway.

The depositional context of many high-latitude archaeological sites often inhibits preservation of hearth features and associated organic remains. When preserved, subsurface hearth features provide insight into the role of plant resources in prehistoric hunter-gatherer economies. This research addresses questions of taphonomy, paleoecology, and prehistoric plant use with archaeobotanical analysis of hearth features from sites located in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve and Gates of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Bardolph. Brian Billman. Jesús Briceño.

Archaeologists have successfully used spatial analyses of different contexts (elite/non-elite, ritual/domestic, public/private, etc.) to examine the intersection of food-related activities with status, political economy, gender, ritual, and the public/private division. In this paper, I consider the intersections of food processing, ritual, and gendered labor through an examination of paleoethnobotanical data from Cerro León, a Gallinazo/Early Moche phase (A.D. 1-300) highland colony in the Moche...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donna Ruhl.

This is an abstract from the ""Re-excavating" Legacy Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees as a metaphor conveys that we sometimes cannot assess situations while we are in the midst of them. Archaeobotanists often report that the most ubiquitous plant type at a site is charred wood. But have we really assessed what these once trees represent: fuel, building remains, indirect evidence of food, or something...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandria Mitchem.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The collection and transport of natural specimens during the long eighteenth century had political, intellectual, and ecological effects. Botanical gardens are key loci to examine the material histories of these processes. Bartram’s Garden, the most prominent botanical garden in North America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Fulkerson. Shannon Tushingham.

The Manila site (CA-HUM-321) is a stratified prehistoric midden site with a long history of use by the Wiyot people. This study, the first of its kind from Humboldt Bay, reveals the results of constituent analyses of excavated materials. Fine-grained analysis of dietary residues from Manila reveals the earliest documented (1,309 cal BP) evidence of mass harvested foods, smelt fishing, and intensive shellfish procurement on the North Coast of California. Paleoethnobotanical analysis of seeds and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Szymanski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The last several millennia of cultural history in the western Kenyan highlands have been marked both by punctuated periods of considerable demographic and economic change, and by continuous in-situ processes of genetic, linguistic, and economic interaction and admixture. Historical linguistic and archaeological models of the peopling of this region have, among...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Naomi Miller. Chantel White.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists periodically encounter concentrations of uncharred plant remains in standing structures. Whether excavated or never actually buried, they are a challenge for interpretation. In addition to identification, the archaeobotanical tasks include determining the agent of deposition and the source and date of the material. This paper considers how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Garay-Vazquez. Dorian Fuller. José Oliver.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeobotanical research of macro-botanical remains in the Caribbean is scarce due to notions of poor preservation in tropical landscapes. This shifted archaeobotanical research towards the analysis of micro-botanical remains because these types of analysis have been reported as more successful for recovering data of subsistence practices in the Neotropics....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Wright. John Jones. Todd Bostwick. Arleyn Simon.

Hohokam communities who resided alongside the perennial rivers in south-central Arizona are renowned for the massive canals they engineered and operated, representing some of the largest preindustrial irrigation systems in the world. In light of such achievement, dry farming technologies and practices remain a lesser known component of the Hohokam agricultural landscape. This paper takes a close look at recent fieldwork around the South Mountains, an upland setting at the confluence of the Salt...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydie Dussol. Kenneth Hirth. Timothy Scheffler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Holocene pollen sequences have highlighted several episodes of vegetation opening in Central America since the Archaic period, which have often been related to the dispersal of nomadic slash-and-burn agriculturalists from the Central Mexican Highlands. However, few archaeobotanical data from archaeological sites have been available to date to examine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Prentiss.

This is an abstract from the "The Housepit 54 Project at Bridge River, British Columbia: Multidisciplinary Contributions to Household Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Housepit 54 project at the Bridge River site (k’etxelknáz), located in the western Interior of southern British Columbia, is designed to address questions concerning the experiences of families occupying a long-lived house. Fifteen intact anthropogenic floors dated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Sharpe. Richard Cooke. Nicole Smith-Guzmán.

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The origin of agriculture in the American tropics drastically altered human societies and their environmental settings. Through the domestication of various plants for subsistence, medicine, and technological purposes, human populations grew and expanded at an unprecedented rate across the landscape from the Middle Holocene onward, spreading...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Harris.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chenopodium, commonly known as goosefoot, is a genus of perennial and annual herbaceous plants. This genus is an abundant seed recovered from paleoethnobotanical assemblages in the Fraser and Columbia Plateaus of North America. While prevalent in the paleobotanical record, they are often discounted as incidental environmental inclusions. A growing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chad Yost.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An important maize kernel processing method is nixtamalization, which involves boiling kernels in alkaline water to soften the kernels and remove the hulls. Researchers investigating maize processing, cooking, and consumption often look for microscopic plant remains called phytoliths. Because phytoliths are susceptible to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Blong. Helen Whelton. Dennis Jenkins. Ian Bull. Lisa-Marie Shillito.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The middle Holocene (9000–6000 cal BP) in the northwestern Great Basin is marked by warmer and drier conditions resulting in significant ecological change. There is archaeological evidence for population decline, highly mobile groups occupying temporary camps, and a focus on seasonally productive resources. Most sites are located on dunes or lake margins...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Hoppa.

This is an abstract from the "Palaeoeconomic and Environmental Reconstructions in Island and Coastal Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper provides an overview of human adaptations to environmental change during 13,000 years of human occupation on the California Channel Islands. In particular, I consider how the range of economically important species shifted with changing environmental conditions and how different foraging...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Olajide.

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the fact that the need to study early indigenous agricultural systems in Africa has long been recognized and reaffirmed in recent archaeological discussions, African agricultural practices are still being modeled using concepts, terminologies, questions, lines of evidence, and methods derived from research elsewhere in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Ryan.

This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Initiated by Dr. William Lipe and Ian (Sandy) Thompson in the late 1980s, the goals of the Environmental Archaeology Program at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center are to study the effects of human occupations on the natural environment, how people socially mediate environmental change, and to contribute...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mario Zimmermann. Jade D'Alpoim Guedes. Mark Altenderfer.

Textile remains have been recovered from burials at the highland site of Samdzong, northwestern Nepal. The fabrics are desiccated exhibiting and high degree of preservation which is shown by the presence of cellular tissue pertaining to bast bundles. In this paper, we discuss methodological approaches towards the study of plant fibers and their surrounding tissues focusing on different techniques of microscopy. We will address advantages and limitations for transmitted and polarized light, as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Lemminger.

This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 1954 to 1957 Dr. Frison excavated Daugherty Cave (48-WA-302). Various perishable artifacts were recovered from the site including moccasins, basketry, cordage, wood, hide and sinew. It is a Late Archaic to Late Prehistoric site on the west side of the Bighorn...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Stroud. Amy Bogaard. Michael Charles. Helena Hamerow.

This is an abstract from the "Challenges and Future Directions in Plant Stable Isotope Analysis in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Farming practice changed in Medieval England, allowing a dramatic increase in cereal production. Historical documents describe 13th century agricultural practices as open-field collective farming including three-field crop rotation and use of the heavy plough. Our research investigates how and when such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tres Zapotes, the largest epi-Olmec site in southern Veracruz, Mexico, has an occupation history spanning 2,000 years from the Early Formative (1500 BCE) to the Classic (300 CE) periods and saw the emergence of political complexity, agricultural economies, and monumental construction in the region (Pool and Loughlin 2017; Pool...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Brumbaugh.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will begin to identify signature flavors of Ancestral Pueblo cuisine in the Mesa Verde area of the American Southwest. Many projects and undertakings include flotation samples and botanical analyses, but often little attention is paid to plants that appear in small quantities. Plants that are used as flavorings – like herbs and spices – are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Conte. Jennifer Bates. Jangsuk Kim.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Neolithic (ca. 6000–1500 BCE) is a formative period of Korea’s prehistory that sees the beginning of plant cultivation. Although archaeobotanical research on Korea’s Neolithic began more than two decades ago, rapid development coupled with an almost total reliance on rushed rescue excavations has resulted in major...